Luigi Serafini and Alan Chan: two eclectic figures and their creative eccentricity

A painter, sculptor, architect, designer, ceramicist, goldsmith, writer – a.k.a. creative omnivore – Luigi Serafini started working with the utopian Paolo Soleri at the then nascent Arcosanti in America, later coming across Sottsass and his Memphis Group, designing the playbill for a Fellini film and, then, a multitude of other things – stage sets, paintings, sculptures, stories, articles … Experiences gathered into a number of retrospectives of his work, such as the famous Luna-Pac Serafini “ontological exhibition” at PAC in Milan. Serafini has always seen art as an amusement park allowing the vast expanse of the cultural unconscious and the social imaginary to be explored. His private entertainment, his huge divertissement, consisted of creating a new alphabet, “a calligraphy, complete with upper- and lower-case letters, punctuation and accents," essentially bringing it into line with his drawings. “The combining of a text and an image generates a semblance of meaning, as we know, even if we understand neither the one nor the other.” Thus, his scribbling of “lines that twisted and curved into curlicues and arabesques” led almost unwittingly to the Codex Seraphinianus, published by Franco Maria Ricci in 1981 and then republished several times. This Deluxe edition, markings its 40th anniversary and embellished with 17 new plates, was published by Rizzoli. A precious object, which instantly became a cult book, was seized upon by Roland Barthes before it had even been published, and was described by Italo Calvino as “the encyclopaedia of a visionary.” Like a stone thrown into a pond, it caused a ripple of derivations and spinoffs in all kinds of media, closely connected with the cultural and aesthetic world and with patronage and the art market. It’s pointless trying to describe it because this illuminated codex, worthy of the best mediaeval amanuenses, has to be touched with the eyes and seen with the mind. Because it’s a distant echo of Hieronymus Bosch’s moments, Escher’s lines and Beatrix Potter’s figures. It is the draughtsmanship of a parallel world, worthy of the most far-fetched Surrealism. To such an extent that its author ascribes its authorship to the white cat he met by chance and took home with him: “It sat there for hours motionless on my shoulders, in contact with my hypophysis. […] How else could I account for so many drawings in so little time, although I do realise that all this might sound rather bizarre,” Serafini writes, describing himself as “merely its manual executor.”